Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Got health?

Here’s something that came my way that takes my mind off the Dalí painting that dealing with recruiters constitutes. It’s a four-minute video presentation of how the world has changed in the areas of health and wealth over the past 200 years.

A couple of things that are interesting to me: the cataclysm of the 1914-1918 war and the influenza pandemic of 1917-1919 causes a visible dip in the global health-wealth continuum. This is the conflagration that 97% of Americans are unaware of.

The second is the (again) obvious effect of colonialism: you’ll notice that the nations of Africa and much of Asia don’t move into the healthy-wealthy quadrant until about 20 years after being cut loose from their imperial masters.

Overall, it’s an example of graphics, for once, being used to actually aid the transfer of information instead of substitute for it.

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